@Faintdreams@dice.camp as someone who is a fan of neither: yes. I rage-read Ready Player One, disliking it almost all the way through, but wanting to see how it ended. I didn’t get far into the first Dungeon Crawler Carl before giving up. It delights in its own assumed knowledge of the subject matter and never stops letting you know how much it knows about it, just like RP1. Denis E. Taylor did the whole referential, knowing pastiche thing with a lot more style and less “look at me, I know stuff!”